Sarah Jessica Parker’s Literary Imprint Takes Off

Sarah Jessica Parker, the actress, shoe (and LBD) designer, producer, and, as of late 2016, literary lion, has acquired her first title as the editorial director of SJP for Hogarth, her line of books within the Hogarth imprint of Penguin Random House’s Crown Publishing Group: Fatima Farheen Mirza’s debut novel, A Place for Us. According to a press release issued this morning, the novel, which follows the lives of an Indian Muslim family in California on the eve of the eldest daughter’s wedding, will be published in 2019.

Mirza, who is 26, is a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop and a former teacher of creative writing and fiction at the University of Iowa and at the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. She began writing the novel when she was in college. “After working on the novel for eight years, I could not be happier with the home it has found,” Mirza said in the press release. “Speaking with Sarah Jessica Parker and Lindsay Sagnette, and seeing the care and enthusiasm they bring to their books has been deeply comforting. I’m confident in their vision for the novel and grateful that it will be brought into the world by SJP for Hogarth.”

Parker, in her new role as publisher, called being “taken hostage by Fatima Mirza’s heartrending and timely story” a “gutting pleasure,” and praised Mirza’s ability to afford her reader a better understanding of “what it means to reconcile one’s love of family and culture with a desire to find one’s own path, and one’s own faith. Ms. Mirza painstakingly details the life of an Indian Muslim family in America and their children’s search to feel whole, fulfilled, and content. She captures your mind and heart with an urgency that defies you to stop reading. I guarantee you will be different when you close the book.” Mirza‘s novel is but the latest in Parker‘s championing of the written word: The actress is also partnering with the American Library Association on their Book Club Central initiative, and will recommend four books a year to be featured on the platform. Her first pick, No One Is Coming to Save Us, by Stephanie Powell Watts, was announced on Saturday. As literature’s latest champion, Parker told The New York Times, “I understand how hard it is to create a good story.”